Our neighborhood theatre in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: “Where Happiness Costs So Little.” The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
I can understand somebody going to the movies because there's nothing else to do, but when somebody really wants to go, and even walks fast so as to get there quicker, then it depresses hell out of me. Especially if I see millions of people standing in one of those long, terrible lines, all the way down the block, waiting with this terrific patience for seats and all.
Holden Caulfield, in Catcher In The Rye
The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.
Andrei Tarkovsky, filmmaker
I don’t see movies ‘cause they’re trash, and they ain’t got nothin’ but naked people in ‘em.
Ouiser Boudreaux, in Steel Magnolias
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael, film critic
Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.
Cecil Day-Lewis, poet & father
